In graphical games, the player character can act in at best a handful of significantly different ways in any given situation. In a text adventure, the player character typically has ten or twenty meaningfully different ways to act in any given situation.

This freedom is liberating: even though the player cannot literally do anything they want, a well-designed text adventure really makes it seem as though they could, by having programmed generic interactions between actions and objects. This freedom can also be used to good effect to give the user alternatives for solving puzzles.